Public Research Talk: Passionate Micrology: Thoreau and Nietzsche’s Erotics of the Closest Things with Nicholas Low
Common Room, Center for the Study of World Religions
42 Francis Ave. Cambridge, MA
Mon., Oct. 26, 2026, 12 – 1:30 p.m. 
Registration is required.
Please register to attend in person.
Please register to attend on Zoom.
Philosophers are often caricatured as having their heads in the clouds, their mind’s eye focused inwardly on far-off visions of “the good,” “the beautiful,” and “the true.” But Friedrich Nietzsche and Henry David Thoreau, the two greatest philosophical descendants of Ralph Waldo Emerson, invert this familiar image, both practicing, in their own ways, a form of philosophy passionately focused on what Nietzsche called the “closest things,” those peculiar, sometimes squalid, and typically ignored matters that make up humanity’s moment-to-moment experience of embodied living. Borrowing Theodore Adorno’s concept of micrological analysis, this presentation examines how Thoreau and Nietzsche, separately but together, strove to reorient the practice of philosophy toward the shadowy micrological frontier. Each calls their inheritors to a disciplined but deeply passionate thinking of the particular and the sensuous, but also indicates the limits of what philosophy, understood as micrological Eros, can be expected to accomplish.
Nicholas Low received an MTS in Philosophy of Religions from Harvard Divinity School, and received his PhD from Harvard University, Committee on the Study of Religion in November 2023. His research focuses on points of contact between theology, religion, and modern philosophy, tracking especially the shadowy afterlives of gods, divinities, and other “religious” phenomena in continental philosophy. His dissertation offers an interpretation of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche as describing and pursuing a discipleship to the god Dionysus, which entails Nietzsche becoming the philosophical mouthpiece that gives voice to the abyssal divinity of the god. Nick’s research project at the CSWR investigates Nietzsche’s madness as an element of his relationship to Dionysus, and the question of what possibilities Dionysian deification holds after Nietzsche.
Programming Series: Transcendentalism
Gazette Classification: Humanities, Lecture, Religion
Sponsor: Center for the Study of World Religions
Contact: [email protected]